Discord ruined what was left of online forums and so it’s users now deserve the full force of enshittification. It was so easy to join, how come it’s this hard to leave?
It's hard to leave because it's easy to join, and because it has the critical mass of users. Simple as that. It takes a lot to get people to abandon their chats, their friends, their groups, and the years of built-up message history, for an app that likely has fewer users and fewer features.
Granted they're not the growing and bustling places they used to be, but there are still both niche and "lifestyle" forums that are alive and stable. Other than this place, one of the latter is where I spend most of my online socializing time.
Yea I saw the writing on the wall years ago. Why do I want a fucking client to talk to mass people. That is a shit format for more than like 6 people in a room.
Element.
If you are missing something, talk to all those motivated people doing Discord bots or whatever, they can contribute to Element/Matrix. And it's actually open source, they keep their contributions, contrary to all the work they have done for Discord for free.
If you think everyone using the Discord/Slack/Mattermost/Rocketchat/... generation of chat with inline image display and all those features, voice and video chat and screen sharing is ever going to switch to IRC at this point you are simply delusional.
Oh, I don't expect it to happen, I'm just pointing out that it still exists and takes care of some of that functionality. I don't think I've ever seen gifs, videos, or screen sharing implemented in IRC.